Kelley Coco was 16 when cancer invaded her body. Frightened, and searching for something, or someone, to hold on to, she journeyed from Boston to the Silver Lining Ranch in Aspen in the summer of 2000.

That’s when she met Andrea Jaeger.

Coco had no clue that Jaeger, at age 16, had been the second-ranked tennis player in the world, a pigtailed, 5-foot-5, 130-pound pixie who slammed winners from the baseline. Coco didn’t know that Jaeger escaped the insular world of professional tennis at age 19, searching for something more fulfilling in her life.

All Coco knew was she felt a warm glow when Jaeger flashed a smile and welcomed her with a sisterly hug.

“I felt like I was the most special person in the world,” said Coco, now a Los Angeles-based producer for the Hallmark Channel whose non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has been in remission for seven years.

In September 2006, at age 41, Jaeger was ordained as a Dominican nun in the Episcopal Church. Coco was not the least bit surprised.

“It made perfect sense,” Coco said. “I had never met anybody else who really lived what they preached. But she lives it 100 percent.”

Last week, Sister Andrea jetted off to Atlanta to accept the 2008 John Wooden Citizenship Award, presented by Athletes for a Better World. As always, she made time for kids, leading a program at Atlanta’s Children’s Hospital. She also attended the funeral of a child who had once attended her camp. In Sister Andrea’s world, hope and heartache are constants.

Friday night, Jaeger, who has lived in Colorado since 1989, will be inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame, largely for her contributions as a humanitarian.

Jaeger considers it an ironic blessing that although she quit the professional tennis circuit 23 years ago, her meteoric athletic career continues opening doors and helps raise the $4.5 million needed annually to keep her foundation running.

“I can look back on my life and know that I won a few tennis matches, but the pats on the back and the awards for humanitarian efforts mean a lot more because it means I’m reaching others,” she said in a phone interview.

It’s been a hectic and trying winter for Jaeger and all involved in her Little Star Foundation, which in 2006 moved its headquarters from Aspen to a ranch near Hesperus in southwest Colorado. Heavy snows, brutally cold temperatures and power outages have wreaked havoc on the 200-acre property Jaeger named Rancho Milagro — “Miracle Ranch.”

None of her struggles today, however, compares to the shallow, empty, lonely feeling Jaeger felt on the tennis circuit after turning pro at age 14. She soon found that her real joy came from helping sick children.

One day, on the spur of the moment, she sold an $18,000 gold watch she received from a commercial endorsement and spent the money on presents for children, which she anonymously donated to hospitals near her home in Florida.

Though she loved the athleticism involved in tennis, she didn’t put her heart and soul into matches in part because she didn’t want to win at someone else’s expense. That attitude cost Jaeger a number of potential victories, including the 1983 Wimbledon final to Martina Navratilova when Jaeger was hammered 6-0, 6-3. Last year, she admitted in an interview with ESPN she deliberately tanked that match, and others.

Jaeger vividly remembers, with a touch of sorrow in her voice, a trip to a suburban high school outside New York.

“I was playing at Madison Square Garden and I had the day off,” she recalled. “Some kids had committed suicide and they were worried about cluster suicides, so I went and visited these kids. These kids were my age (17), and I thought, ‘They shouldn’t be killing themselves.’ ”

But when she got back to New York, public relations executives for the women’s tour called Jaeger into the office. According to Jaeger, they chastised her for the unsponsored trip.

“Somehow the story had reached The New York Times and the tour’s PR people were angry,” she said. “They thought I made the rest of the players look bad. They threw a newspaper at me — it hit me right in the chest — and said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ ”

A year later, her career came unglued at the 1984 French Open when she blew out her shoulder.

“My injury was, in a strange way, a blessing,” Jaeger said. “I had a tremendous natural athletic gift and instincts, but I wouldn’t do anything to win like so many others. For whatever reason, God said, ‘This one is not going to get ruined by sports. I’m going to take her.’ ”

Jaeger quit the game, sold her Mercedes and invested her $1.4 million in earnings and her entire pension into what has become the Little Star Foundation.

Sister Andrea’s hero is St. Catherine of Siena, a 14th-century mystic and Dominican sister who tended to the sick and plague-stricken. Jaeger said it was a spiritual dream featuring St. Catherine that ultimately convinced her to become a nun.

“She was kind of a rebel, always in people’s faces, telling them the truth,” she said. “She was not one of those people who prayed and stayed back. She didn’t have formal training in the church, but she had gumption.”

And compassion. The kind of compassion Cory Sheridan felt from Jaeger in the summer of 2000, shortly after complications from cancer forced doctors to amputate his right leg above the knee.

“I was a shy kid and nervous about being different because I had just lost my leg,” Sheridan recalled. “But with Andrea I felt safe and comfortable. I never had time to sit back and dwell on what happened to me.”

Sheridan, now 21 and cancer-free, attends Oakland University outside Detroit. He was just a few hours short of his degree in business when he experienced a dramatic change of heart.

“I decided to switch from business to become an elementary school teacher,” he said. “I kind of have to start from scratch, so it’s going to take me a couple more years.”

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